The Trouble with Spies

Many Big names in this spy caper. Although there are more spies than caper. They work very hard to get the jokes across. Angus (Robert Morley) sends Porter (Donald Sutherland) on a mission to Ibiza. Ned Beatty and Ruth Gordon are guests staying at the hotel. Lucy Gutteridge plays the hotel owner. Greg Sierra (from Barney Miller) is the po-po who shows up to question the guests. It's listed as a drama, but everyone tells jokes, and then we pause a couple seconds to give us time to laugh. If we really wanted to. I can see why this gets very low ratings on imdb... the script needed a tune-up, in spite of all these big names. And not much meat on the plot. Was the novel really this light, or was too much left on the editing floor? And the opening title was mis-spelled: Spys instead of Spies. That shows the attention to detail this film got. And for a hotel full of spies, no-one even tries to act normally.. they are always talking about what all the other guests may or may not be up to. No surprises. No plot turns. It goes blandly along. Just lacks the spy-adventure that makes us want to see what's coming next. Directed by Burt Kennedy. Novel by Marc Lovell. This seems to be an HBO production.

The movie doesn't know if it wants to be a spy spoof or a serious spy story. It fails at both. It fails in the romance area too. The only good part was the topless beach scene.

British spymaster Robert Morley gets incompetent spy Donald Sutherland to go to Ibiza, when a new drug developed by the Russians is being sold.

It's based on Marc MacShane's novel APPLE PIE IN THE SKY, one of fourteen comic spy novels about the incompetent Appleton Porter. Burt Kennedy wrote and directed the movie, and he hired such reliable comedy performers as Ned Beatty, Ruth Gordon (in her last movie appearance), and Robert Morley. The result is singularly free from much humor. Oh, you may find it funny to watch Morley tell Sutherland what an idiot he is without Sutherland noticing, or Sutherland disguising himself in immense facial hair and a Hawaiian shirt, but it's all done in a rather straightforward fashion, with Sutherland lucking into surviving by pure chance. Even location shooting in Ibiza doesn't help.

Flatly directed spy comedy has no laughs, and Donald Sutherland is embarrassingly miscast. Only his romance with Lucy Gutterridge is kinda sweet. 88 minutes too long. *1/2 out of 4.

British officer porter in a mission in Ibiza, where his mate trent got missing. In a few scenes he should got killes, but he's glad, they failed. Mona, his host, turns out to work for the "usual tricks"-department of the KGB.